Art loves Agriculture

For The Wedding between Art & Agriculture, Penumbra Sans has been wed to Penumbra Serif. Lance Hidy’s all-caps typeface family comes in four styles: Sans, Flare, Half Serif and Serif. Each of them has four weights.

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5 Comments on
“Art loves Agriculture”

It wasn’t too long ago that Penumbra was available in the vanished Multiple Master format, which meant you could adjust the letterforms with sliders that veeerrryyy slooowly redrew them to independently change weight or length of serifs. Now there are only a few 'instances’ to select from, when you once had all the combinations of weights and serif sizes between them.

I saw this today for the first time, and like it very much. Nice use of Penumbra. Regarding Chris’s comment, it is still possible to make interpolations between the 16 variations of serif and weight. To do this you set the word, make a copy and drag it several line space below, and assign a different serif or weight to it. Then select both lines and use the blend tool, which will let you state how many in-between variations you want. Works great.

Thanks for chiming in, Lance! Are you saying that Illustrator’s Blend function will interpolate in the same way that Multiple Master did? This possibility fascinates me. I tried it using Penumbra Serif and Sans (OT) and got the result below. The serifs are indeed very similar to the Half Serif style (shown at left) but there are some aberrations, such as bowing at the foot of the ‘P’. Did I skip a step?

Lance Hidysays:

Jul 11th, 2013 5:50 pm

Stephen, I had forgotten that the P and R do not interpolate correctly. They need doctoring to fix the mid-stem join and bottom serif.